The sanatoriums designed for tuberculosis (TB) treatment aimed to provide the patients convalescence mainly by two approaches: by encouragement to become part of social/public life while learning to live with TB, and by softening the feeling of “hospital-ness” in individualized rooms as spaces of convalescence. Despite their sterile appearances and clinical atmospheres, sanatoriums were also emotionally charged spaces that aimed to convey a sense of belonging for the patients. For this reason, the patients were encouraged to personalize their main living environment; i.e., their rooms, as most of their time was spent in the cycle of rooms/cure balconies with intervals of meals and some occasional entertainment in the public spaces. The rooms, thus became, their temporary homes. For instance, in some institutions, the patients’ belongings were even not confiscated but rather were encouraged to keep in their rooms (the in-situ cupboards – “yüklük”), and a permanent sense of belonging was thus created in spaces of transience. This belonging was only temporary and later the rooms were cleaned to spotless perfection:  as soon as the patients checked out their rooms were very instantly and obsessively sanitized, and any traces of the patients were erased. Every surface contacted by the patient was scrubbed and sanitized, laundry was boiled, even the walls were washed over thanks to the material qualities of those finishes and objects. The resulting effect of once a domesticated interior was like an unused, sterile space before the next patient, who will also become part of this recurring cycle, and in the end, leave with memories and nostalgia.

The aim of this study is thus to scrutinize this belonging/nostalgia from the memoirs of the patients who were treated at the twentieth-century sanatoriums of Turkey, as told and documented in biographical and autobiographical recounts, and articles in medical journals such as Yaşamak Yolu (established by İstanbul Tuberculosis Society) and popular lifestyle magazines like Yedigün. The aim is to discuss the role of design in this contrast between the physical transience of the medical body and the spiritual longevity of the homelike space in a medical environment: Turkish sanatoriums in providing convalescence to TB patients, offered the feeling of “home” in its spaces of transience.